How to get rid of tavo.exe, kavo.exe trojan

Most frivolous Windows users would have had their antivirus shouting at some point of time with a message “Alert! A virus was found” and then popping windows that mention “kavo.exe”. kavo.exe is a smart trojan that installs and autorun.inf in your C:\ making sure it updates itself everytime you connect to the internet. The bad news is that this can be quite irritating and painful as most antivirus software fail to remove it. The good news is that a little bit of common sense can help!
So lets go ahead and get rid of the kavos and tavos on our own!

• First and foremost check for an autorun.inf file in C:\. Open the file and check if has references to kavo or tavo. Delete such a file.
• Delete all files in C:\ that have a “.com” extension.
• Goto C:\Windows\system32\
• Search for “kavo”, you would get results like kavo.exe, kavo.dll, kavo0.dll, kavo1.dll. Go ahead and delete kavo.dll and then kavo.exe. Then try to delete the other kavo dll files. If you get a message that the file are in use and cannot be deleted restart your computer and try deleting them again. In this manner delete all “kavo” files from system32.
• Search for “tavo” and repeat the procedure explained for kavo.
• Now all your bad files are gone and you just need to remove the registry entries.
• Hit Windows+Run and type “regedit”. Browse to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and delete entries that have the name kava and tava. More easily download CCleaner and run the registry scan from it. This will show you all unwanted registry entries. kava and tava would also be listed as we have removed the exes related to them. Click on “Fix selected issues” and do not take a backup of the registry.
• Now delete all weirdly named files from C:\. Typically they would belong to the list below:

• Autorun.inf
• o.exe
• nxvhpc.exe
• ff1q0gw.bat
• i8.com
• e6ieg.exe
• 6qe.com
• cfv90h.com
• ab.cmd
• k2.cmd
• h2.com
• u.exe
• fufb6tq3.cmd
• ekf6dbg0.com
• h2.com
• rtnlpipu.com
• 1i.com
• c18vk.exe
• ntphyy.com

Your system is all clean now.

Elisa – The Open Media Center

I’m not sure if too many people know about Elisa, quite frankly it is quite amazing that something as wonderful as Elisa is not in the limelight(as yet!). For a quick and brief introduction, Elisa is a sleek next generation media center where you can watch videos, browse pictures, manage music etc.

Read ahead for a quick list of features:

MUSIC:

Elisa finds music and arranges it by artist, by album and by folder. It includes all the album art to give you a very interesting interface to play with. Elisa has been designed in a extensible manner by which adding plugins can enhance features. It currently bundles the shoutcast radio plugin.

VIDEOS:

Elisa arranges videos and allows you to play them. It also has a youtube plugin that can be used to browse youtube videos!

PICTURES:

Elisa finds pictures from the default folders. The picasa extension allows you to browse pictures uploaded to your web album.

All locations that Elisa can look into can be defined in home/~user~/.elisa/elisa.conf. Whats better is that the file locations, network urls, anything!

Elisa works on both Windows and Linux, though on Windows its still an alpha release.

Some tips to install Elisa on Ubuntu:

Elisa is packaged with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) To install and get it working properly with all plugins do:

$ sudo apt-get install elisa

$ sudo apt-get install elisa-plugins-bad elisa-plugins-ugly

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-*

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad

$ elisa

Here’s a link to install Elisa on earlier versions of Ubuntu: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766012

SpikeWAMP – Part ii

It was not too long ago that I blogged about SpikeWAMP here, SpikeSource has made a release for SpikeWAMP 1.4 beta recently. This time, they have gone one step ahead and created application installers for Drupal, Gallery and phpBB. These application installers do not limit its users to one app but allow installation of the other two through the updater. So the users don’t need to download the stack each time.

Right now they are out with 3 application with more in the pipeline. Significant changes for this releases are:

• Application installers (Drupal, phpBB, Gallery and more coming soon!)
• Support for Windows Server 2008 and Vista.
• Significant changes on the platform.
• Works with Windows Server 2008 certification ready!
• Latest versions of Apache and PHP
• New crisp look.

For more information about SpikeWAMP, click here. What’s more? They are available for free download here.

With a continued effort from by SpikeSource, opensource software is now ready to take off on the Windows platform too. These quality installers are worth giving a try!

Install Skype on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) + configure sound

Here are a  quick set of steps to install skype on Ubuntu 8.04.

• Download skype static from here
• Execute the following commands at the terminal:

$tar -xvf skype_static-2.0.0.68.tar.bz2

$mv /yourpath/skype_static-2.0.0.68 /usr/share/

$ mv skype_static-2.0.0.68/ skype

$ cd skype/

$ cp skype /usr/bin/

$ rm /etc/dbus-1/system.d/skype.conf

$ cp /usr/share/skype/skype.conf /etc/dbus-1/system.d/

$ skype

Sound configuration:

• Execute the command below in a terminal

$ apt-get install alsa-firmware

• Open volume control and click on File -> Change device. Make sure the Alsa mixer is selected.
• Click on Edit -> Preferences and check microphone, mic boost, internal mic boost — whatever applicable
• Try a skype test call!

Windows installers for Linux distributions

Much talk has been happening about Wubi that is going to be a part of Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron. Wubi is a utility that allows installation of Ubuntu through Windows! What’s more? You can uninstall it using Add/Remove Programs in the Windows control panel.

For the geeks, what Wubi does is:

A small executable that can be included on the CD which does the following:

• If an Ubuntu CD is not present in a CD drive, locates the ISO on your system or downloads it via metadl (which can be taught to perform mirror selection)
• Asks for a user name and password
• Gathers information from Windows for the remaining install settings
• Creates a 5GB image file in a user-defined location, C:\ubuntu by default
• Creates a pre-seed file for the install
• Adds Ubuntu entry to the Windows bootloader
• Reboots to start an install process (non-interactive)
  • if a CD is present in a drive, uses that; otherwise loop-mounts an ISO image from the Windows drive
  • loop-mounts disk image from the Windows drive
• Uses a pre-seed enabled version of ubiquity
• Reboot again to start Ubuntu (or Windows)
• Allows simple removal of Ubuntu if desired, via a Windows-based uninstaller in add/remove programs
• Installer can be launched from the WinFOSS browser

Read the full post here

However not many know that this feature is already available in Mandriva Linux

Mandriva can be installed from another operating system that is rpm based or deb based, not just Windows. It works using UNetbootin which adds an entry in the boot menu to install Mandriva. (Read here…)

Shift Linux (by the Windows guys) has recently released 0.6.5 that is based on Hardy Heron beta. Right now its more of a live cd but there are plans of a full release too. Most probably this would include Wubi too (Isn’t too surprising considering its based on Hardy Heron) (Read here…)

Finally lets talk a bit about UNetbootin. Now this allows you to install any operating system like ubuntu, madriva, fedora etc through Windows. The number of distributions listed here is surprising and slightly spoils the show for Wubi. UNetbootin however works in a different way than Wubi and this very technique makes it so generic. (Read a useful tutorial here…)

Wubi however is still easier for a user who isn’t very technical or does not have the patience and still wants to install and use Linux. Things only become easier by the day!